Thinking Through Smell: Theories of Olfaction in Early Modern Ottoman and Islamic Culture

Abstract

While the political, social, and material histories of smell and perfume in the Ottoman and other early modern Muslim societies have received some scholarly attention, the intellectual history of olfaction in the Islamic world remains largely unstudied. This is a significant shortcoming in so far as practices involving perfume and stink are always embedded in, and informed by, discursively constituted smellscapes. This article studies some of the conceptual parameters – philosophical-epistemological, mystical, and ethico-legal – within which smells were perceived in the early modern Islamic world. As the article demonstrates, not only was olfaction credited, by some, with great epistemic and even salvific importance, the question of smell and of the perception of smell also informed debates about who, and on what basis, should be attributed authority in matters of science, religion, and the sociopolitical order.